Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

Korsch nodded. “Well, if your friend Gerdy is disposed to foretell the future, see if she can predict if there’s going to be another war.”

“You don’t need Cassandra for that, Friedrich. Even I can tell there’s going to be another war. It’s the only possible explanation for Adolf Hitler. He just wants it that way. He always did.”

Hugging the shadows of the shop doorway like a nervous cat, I watched Friedrich Korsch as he barked orders at his men in front of the brightly lit corner bar in Freyming-Merlebach. So close to the historic border nobody would have paid much attention to a group of men speaking German — including one particular man wearing leather shorts. The Saarland might have become an administrative part of France but, from what I had read in the papers, few people bothered to parler Français there. Even in Freyming-Merlebach there were signs for German beer and cigarettes on the steamy window of the bar and just to see these made me feel a little closer to home and safety; it was ages since I’d necked a Schloss Bräu or puffed on a Sultan or a Lasso. A long time had passed since Germany, and its old familiar habits, had felt so near to my heart.

Korsch was wearing a short, black belted leather coat that I felt sure he’d owned almost twenty years before, when he’d still been a young Kripo detective in Berlin. But the leather flat cap he was wearing looked to have been more recently acquired and added a proletarian, almost Leninish touch to his appearance, as if he was anxious to conform to the political realities of life in the new Germany, or at least in half of it. But it was his voice I recognized most: among Germans, the Berlin accent is considered one of the strongest and most abrasive in the language, and among Berliners, the Kreuzberg accent is about as strong as Löwensenf mustard. Korsch’s accent had been one of the things that had, perhaps, stopped him from making commissar under the Nazis. Senior Berlin detectives like Arthur Nebe — who was the son of a Berlin schoolteacher — and like Erich Lieberman von Sonnenberg, an aristocrat, and even Otto Trettin had always regarded Friedrich Korsch as a bit of a Mackie Knife, which wasn’t helped by the fact that he always carried an eleven-centimeter switchblade in his pocket, as a backup for the broom-handle Mauser he favored. Kreuzberg was the kind of place where even grandmothers carried a switchblade or at least a long hat pin. In truth, however, Korsch was a well-educated man with his Abitur who enjoyed music and the theater, and collected stamps for a hobby. I wondered if he still owned the twenty-pfennig stamp of Beethoven that lacked a perforation and which he’d told me would one day be valuable. Were communists allowed to do something as bourgeois as make money from selling a rare stamp? Probably not. Profit was always going to be the ideological doorjamb on which communism stubbed its ugly toe.

I pressed myself back against the door as the Stasi man in the leather shorts walked toward me lighting a French cigarette. In the dusk the cigarette lighter also lit up a boyish face with a deep scar that meandered off his forehead and down his cheek like a length of unruly hair; somehow it missed an eye that was as blue as an African lily and probably just as poisonous. Halfway across the street the man stopped and turned as Korsch finished what he was saying with the words “damned idiots,” spoken loudly and with real venom.

Then he said, “That was the comrade-general I was speaking to on the telephone. He told me his contact in the French police reported that a man answering Gunther’s description was spotted a few kilometers west of here, in a place called Puttelange-aux-Lacs, less than two hours ago. The French police lost him, of course. Idiots. They couldn’t catch a fucking apple if it fell off a tree. And he may have stolen a car — a green Renault Frégate — to help make his escape. In which case he could well be here by now. And if he is here it’s my guess he’ll dump the Renault and try and make it into the Saar on foot. Through here or one of these other shitty little towns along what used to be the border.”

“That’s a nice little car,” said another Stasi man, echoing my own opinion.

“But it looks like Mielke was right about this place,” Korsch continued. “We’re to keep an eye out in case he tries to cross over tonight. Which means constant vigilance. If I find one of you bastards sneaking in some shut-eye when you should be looking out for Gunther, I’ll shoot you myself.”

The news that Mielke had a man — possibly more than one — in the French police didn’t surprise me. The country was riddled with communists and it was less than a decade since the French Section of the Workers’ International — the SFIO — had participated in the provisional government of the liberation. Stalin might have been dead but the French Communist Party — the PCF — led by Thorez and Duclos, remained doctrinaire, hard-line Stalinists and none of the red Franzis, even the ones in the police, would have had a second thought about collaboration with the Stasi. But it did surprise me that the information being provided was up-to-the-minute and accurate. In itself this was alarming. But that the Stasi were devoting more effort to my elimination than even I could have imagined was worse; Erich Mielke wasn’t the kind of man to leave loose ends, and of course I was as loose an end as you could find outside of a string factory.

“And if we do find him, sir?”

Korsch considered this for less than a second. “We kill him, of course. Make it look like a suicide. String him up in the woods and leave the body for the local cops. Then go home. So there’s your incentive, boys. As soon as the bastard’s dead we can all go and get ourselves drunk somewhere and then head back to Germany.”

I heard the hobnailed footsteps of someone walking up the dimly lit street and, a few seconds later, a man wearing a blue boiler jacket and carrying a large shopping bag with a baguette poking out of the top like a submarine’s periscope hove slowly into view on the same side as the dark doorway I was standing in. Of course, even in the dwindling light he saw me immediately, paused for a moment, allowed his face to register some surprise, muttered a quiet “Bonsoir,” and then carried on walking until he came abreast of the Stasi man wearing the shorts and the long woolen stockings. It wasn’t unusual in this rural part of France for men to wear lederhosen . Leather shorts were popular with Alsatian farmers because they are comfortable, hardwearing, and don’t show the dirt. The man with the shopping bag would probably have ignored the Stasi man in the shorts but for the fact that the German stepped into his way with the obvious intent of checking that this was not me attempting to make my escape. I couldn’t blame him for that; the man in the blue jacket looked more like me than I did.

“Yes?” he said. “What do you want, monsieur?”

The man in shorts fired up his lighter and held it in front of the other man’s face like someone exploring a cave. “Nothing, Grandad,” he said. “I’m sorry, I mistook you for someone else. Relax. Here, have a cigarette.”

The old man took one from the offered packet and placed it in his mouth. The lighter flared again. If the old man mentioned having seen me in the doorway farther down the street I was dead.

“Who is it you’re looking for? Perhaps I can help you find him. I know everyone in Freyming-Merlebach. Even one or two Germans.”

“Never mind,” said the Stasi man sharply. “Forget it. It’s not important.”

“Are you sure? You and your friends seem to be all over this town tonight. Must be someone important.”